The following is a list of acronyms used in the patent application.
3GPP 3rd Generation Partnership Project
ACR Automatic Charging Relay
AVP Attribute Value Pair
BD Billing Domain
CCF Charging Collection Function
CDF Charging Data Function
CDR Charging Data Record
CGF Charging Gateway Function
CPU Central Processing Unit
CTF Charging Trigger Function
EPC Evolved Packet Core
IMS IP Multimedia Subsystem
LTE Long Term Evolution
MMSC Multimedia Messaging Service Centre
MMTel MultiMedia Telephony service
P-CSCF Proxy Call Session Control Function
PCC Policy and Charging Control
PCEF Policy Charging Enforcement Function
PCRF Policy and Charging Rules Function
PGW PDN Gateway
Rf Radio frequency
SMSC Short Message Service Center
TTL Time To Live
In network centralized charging architectures, network elements can create their own CDRs. Service providers often centralize this functionality in an offline charging system so that they can exercise tighter control on the format and contents of the CDRs produced centrally. Unfortunately, in a multi-vendor networks an operator incurs higher expenses if several vendors have to make modifications to CDRs, rather than having the changes done centrally at the CCF.
In typical communication systems, the network elements do not create CDRs locally but rather send charging information to a CCF for both event and session based charging. The CCF typically creates a CDR per charging information received from network elements. In this architecture, network elements have to collect charging related parameters and send to the CCF in a real-time fashion, even if it is an offline charge.
The CDRs in current communication systems include every bit of information that can be culled from the CTFs/Network Elements. This leads to a relatively large CDR. The CDR is handled by the downstream billing mediation system, which typically cuts away the non-essential information and thereby negates the processing applied by the upstream elements, namely network elements. This wastes bandwidth in transmission of such data.
With increasing functions and features in communication networks, such as LTE/EPC networks, required mandatory and optional charging parameters have exponentially increased in last few years. Network elements collect a large number of charging parameters in real time and stuff them in ACR request messages to the CCF. Viewed as a single message, it may be a minimal amount of processing for today's high performance computing platforms. However, with the usage seen in LTE/EPC, for example, there may be millions of sessions going on simultaneously, and an operator invests in the equipment with the performance engineering requirements for the peak traffic to handle subscriber demand. It costs significant network elements CPU time and storage space for collecting and caching these parameters. It also increases the size of the Rf ACR message sent to the CCF which has to process the ACR with large data immediately.
Therefore, current systems waste computing resources and network bandwidth. Additionally, the transmission of large amounts of data in real-time for an offline charging mechanism is inefficient and overly consumes system bandwidth.